While I hardly consider myself an expert on Canadian literature, I still occasionally am surprised when I discover a major author I've never even heard of. To some extent, this happened to me with the poets Al Purdy and Louis Dudek. I had been aware of George Bowering and Robert Kroetsch, but not these two. (Nor was I aware of George Stanley or W.H. New, but these two seem to be secret poets of Vancouver that are not talked about beyond B.C.)
My knowledge is much more limited for authors coming out of Quebec. Of the Anglophone writers, there is obviously Mordecai Richler and arguably Yann Martel. I had been aware of Marie-Claire Blais back in the 90s, though only her earlier work like St. Lawrence Blues. Over the past twenty years, I have become aware of Gabrielle Roy and much more recently the playwright Wajdi Mouawad, who I imagine I'll write about again. Then in 2012 I learned quite a bit more about Robert Lepage and actually saw him perform his Far Side of the Moon.
However, I had never come across (or don't remember) Michel Tremblay, who is arguably a much more central figure in Francophone theatre. What is particularly intriguing is that he started off writing essentially fantastic or speculative fiction (Stories for Late Night Drinkers and The City in the Egg), then moved to plays and quickly thereafter experimental theatre, then started writing more traditional novels about the working-class Montrealers that were in some of these plays. So he's kind of done it all as a writer, which is quite admirable if a bit daunting and overwhelming.
Just a week ago, I saw a production of For The Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, which is basically a play written to let his mother live again on stage. She was a loving, but a bit querulous, mother. Sadly, it appears that she died before Michel had any real triumphs as a writer. I can certainly relate to that... I wouldn't say it is a great play by any means, but it is touching.
Of his vast body of work, I just read Late Night Drinkers, which I will review tomorrow. I think I will work through a few of his early plays, particularly Les Belles-Sœurs (which actually has some interesting echoes (or pre-echoes) of Kieślowski's Decalogue X) and Bonjour, là, bonjour. Then move to Albertine in Five Times and The Real World. After the move, I'll certainly keep my eyes open to see if any of his plays are remounted in Toronto.
On the novel side, I guess I will mostly focus on the Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal, which is comprised of six novels set in Montreal, beginning with The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant and ending with A Thing of Beauty. These are basically the stories of his parents and their neighbours and perhaps later his own friends in this Montreal neighbourhood. I have The Fat Woman checked out and should be able to get through it by the end of the month. It strikes me as a bit like Ulysses (or even Under Milk Wood) in that there are all these voices overlapping to make one complex portrait of shared life in the city (with Under Milk Wood being more of a village). I have no idea if the later novels keep up this approach or not.
Tremblay then took a detour and wrote 3 novels (the Black, Red and Blue Notebooks) about the art world of the 60s and its excesses. It features transvestites, a dwarf, actors of all stripes, and of course various hangers-on and people just slumming. This sounds a bit interesting, but is not a priority for me.
I am more interested in a trilogy of novels Tremblay wrote after this to provide the back-story of his mother and perhaps a few other characters from the Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal. This explores how a woman with a mixed (i.e. Cree) background came from Saskatchewan to Montreal. I assume it is explained whether she was an English speaker who learned French later, or if she actually was raised in a Francophone household out on the prairie. The novels are La Traversée du continent, La Traversée de la ville and La Traversée des sentiments. As far as I can tell, only the first one (Crossing the Continent) has come out in English translation, though the others are obviously being prepared.
One of the major questions with Tremblay is whether to bite the bullet and attempt to read his novels in French. (I don't think I would ever be able to keep up with French theatre, but have a bit more time and can go over passages when reading a novel.) However, it might be awfully frustrating, as Tremblay is using a lot of Montrealer slang that probably doesn't show up in any dictionary. Still, I've found a very good deal on a one-volume edition of the Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal, so I might pick that up. I guess I can at least wait to see how I respond to the The Fat Woman in English.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Journals (old)
I have to admit that I am generally quite poor at writing journals. The only time I was really consistent was for a few years in undergrad, though I do have some notebooks from high school. I will periodically write a few pages of what I am up to every few months, particularly if it involves a dream, since I don't feel like imposing my dreams on others. Generally, however, if I can keep the events short enough, I would prefer to put them in an email or, increasingly, post them on the blog. First, I may get some reaction and, second, the editing required to turn one's life into something at least a bit interesting to others is good practice.
What is a little sad is that the number of people that I can have reliable email exchanges with has gone way, way down. Partly people are in different mental spaces in their 40s than in their 20s or even 30s. And I can be an exhausting correspondent, and I have certainly burned through and burned out a number of former email friends. I think I really do try to respond to what they are saying and not just go into my own life and issues, but it is hard to tell. Probably putting more of these things on the blog is the way forward. I do remember that for the longest time I felt I was repeating the same mistakes over and over, particularly in relationships. I am still doing the overwhelming and burning out friends thing, though my internal "regulator" is a bit better. Now I have a different set of things that I keep doing (working too late, obsessively working through lists of books, trying to capture/experience all the great music and art of Western Civilization) but some of the other issues hardly seem like a problem any more.
In any event, I am just about done with scanning and collating all the email that I saved from the 90s (yes, Virginia, we had email -- and computers -- back then). There is a lot of it, and there are some things that I barely remember that I wrote on quite extensively at the time. I suppose it is less surprising that what I have forgotten the most is what was going on in other people's lives, particularly their romantic travails (there was a lot of that in the emails back then). No question there was a lot of oversharing (which I am always attacking the Millennials for engaging in), though in my defense it is quite different to email a story or situation to one or two friends versus putting something up on Facebook or, even worse, Twitter.
Two things that seem worth dredging up from all these journals and the masses of email messages. It turns out that I left Toronto in August 1994, so I will be returning (in triumph?) almost exactly 20 years later. When I realized this, it gave me a bit of a shock. The situation clearly demands some reflection.*
Second, I found some very interesting discussions with a friend that I had totally put out of my mind. She had been telling me about some adventures that were not strictly state-sanctioned and a few other things that were perhaps a bit shocking, at least coming from her. And perhaps she was trying to shock me. I wrote that after she offered up these morsels, she sat back, looking as amoral as a cat, and waited for my response.** Perhaps I passed, perhaps I didn't. We remain friends, though someone distant ones today. It is tempting to write more, but that would certainly be too much information and wouldn't allow me to deny the identity of this friend if she ever happens to come across this post and wonder just what the heck I am talking about. "You don't mean that time that I--?" "No, no. This isn't about you at all," I shall reply.
* Is it finally time to either write out this story that is essentially my life in Toronto in my early 20s or just to let it go? I've had professional success that very few people from Gen X ever achieved (to say nothing of those poor Gen Y suckers), so why am I so fixated on this one period when I was failing at being an English major, to put it bluntly? Is it that the story that I have conceived is simply the most dramatic of all the storylines one could conceivably generate from my life (that would be ok) or is it something more mundane like just not wanting to grow old? If it is the latter, then there just isn't much point in pretending that what I come up with is going to be interesting to others, and I should save my energy.
** I was actually going to tie this in with all the cats in the Delayed Mercy review, but that one already ran a bit long.
What is a little sad is that the number of people that I can have reliable email exchanges with has gone way, way down. Partly people are in different mental spaces in their 40s than in their 20s or even 30s. And I can be an exhausting correspondent, and I have certainly burned through and burned out a number of former email friends. I think I really do try to respond to what they are saying and not just go into my own life and issues, but it is hard to tell. Probably putting more of these things on the blog is the way forward. I do remember that for the longest time I felt I was repeating the same mistakes over and over, particularly in relationships. I am still doing the overwhelming and burning out friends thing, though my internal "regulator" is a bit better. Now I have a different set of things that I keep doing (working too late, obsessively working through lists of books, trying to capture/experience all the great music and art of Western Civilization) but some of the other issues hardly seem like a problem any more.
In any event, I am just about done with scanning and collating all the email that I saved from the 90s (yes, Virginia, we had email -- and computers -- back then). There is a lot of it, and there are some things that I barely remember that I wrote on quite extensively at the time. I suppose it is less surprising that what I have forgotten the most is what was going on in other people's lives, particularly their romantic travails (there was a lot of that in the emails back then). No question there was a lot of oversharing (which I am always attacking the Millennials for engaging in), though in my defense it is quite different to email a story or situation to one or two friends versus putting something up on Facebook or, even worse, Twitter.
Two things that seem worth dredging up from all these journals and the masses of email messages. It turns out that I left Toronto in August 1994, so I will be returning (in triumph?) almost exactly 20 years later. When I realized this, it gave me a bit of a shock. The situation clearly demands some reflection.*
Second, I found some very interesting discussions with a friend that I had totally put out of my mind. She had been telling me about some adventures that were not strictly state-sanctioned and a few other things that were perhaps a bit shocking, at least coming from her. And perhaps she was trying to shock me. I wrote that after she offered up these morsels, she sat back, looking as amoral as a cat, and waited for my response.** Perhaps I passed, perhaps I didn't. We remain friends, though someone distant ones today. It is tempting to write more, but that would certainly be too much information and wouldn't allow me to deny the identity of this friend if she ever happens to come across this post and wonder just what the heck I am talking about. "You don't mean that time that I--?" "No, no. This isn't about you at all," I shall reply.
* Is it finally time to either write out this story that is essentially my life in Toronto in my early 20s or just to let it go? I've had professional success that very few people from Gen X ever achieved (to say nothing of those poor Gen Y suckers), so why am I so fixated on this one period when I was failing at being an English major, to put it bluntly? Is it that the story that I have conceived is simply the most dramatic of all the storylines one could conceivably generate from my life (that would be ok) or is it something more mundane like just not wanting to grow old? If it is the latter, then there just isn't much point in pretending that what I come up with is going to be interesting to others, and I should save my energy.
** I was actually going to tie this in with all the cats in the Delayed Mercy review, but that one already ran a bit long.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
7th Canadian challenge - 9th review - George Bowering's Delayed Mercy
I thought this would sneak under the wire in Feb., but work (and my kids) had other ideas.
Delayed Mercy and Other Poems was a collection that really stood out among Bowering's various collections. I think it does have quite a bit of internal consistency. The blurb on the back tries to connect it to Kerrisdale Elegies, but I am not familiar enough that one (though I have read it a while ago) to know if it is a fair comparison.
The largest portion of the book is given over to Delayed Mercy, a large multi-part poem with seven separate sections and different poems in each section. Then there is a short section of 5 poems from late 1984, simply titled Section Two. Then there are some poems retrieved from a notebook called Irritable Reaching. The volume closes out with 7 poems in a section titled The Pope's Pennies.
I wasn't that taken with The Pope's Pennies, and I'll just skip over it here. Section Two was fairly slight, though I liked the opening of "Thanks, Bob":
Reading Kroetsch's poem
about taking the wrong German
train, I missed
my stop. On the Toronto
subway.
Irritable Reaching was by far the most different from the other parts of the book. I think I mentioned before that Bowering seems determined to move to different stylistic techniques, most likely to prevent himself from getting bored, or even as technical exercises that he then deems worthy of publication. Nearly all the poems in I.R. rhyme, but the rhyme schemes start to move away from AABB or ABAB fairly quickly. (Brain that Vanishes has just one extra line that breaks it away from ABAB.) "Detachment from Self" is ABCABCABC, which is fairly unusual. My favorite of the bunch is "Ground and Sky" which goes ABCDEF ABCDEF. I'm not sure if I've ever seen this scheme before. Years ago I wrote a poem that went ABCDEF FEDCBA (though it might actually have another 2 or 4 paired lines -- I'll have to try to track it down to check), which is also very rare.
Still, there is no question that the heart of the collection is Delayed Mercy. Virtually all of the poems are dedicated to different poets, primarily from Canada or the States. It is not clear if these are all poets that Bowering actually knows at least in passing, though it wouldn't be that unlikely if he knew many of them. However, I doubt he knew Samuel Beckett or even Charles Reznikoff, and these are poems that are responding to their public personas.
One or two of the poems to the poets he clear did know do feel a bit "intrusive," as if Bowering is giving you a peek into some shared backstory (that the other poet might not want to share). For instance, "Motel Consideration" is from Margaret Atwood. It opens:
The one more child you never had.
her face appears outside the window,
but when you go outside
only happy birds chitter in their hundreds.
You need a fierce cat.
I'm aware that it is common knowledge that Atwood only had one child, and has talked about this a bit in interviews, but it still feels like oversharing someone else's personal history. Still, poets are notorious for over-sharing (Sharon Olds is one of the more notorious from our era, but the confessional poets of the 50/60s (Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Snodgrass and Sexton) paved that path.
The poem continues with a bit of highway driving, perhaps apropos of a poem about a motel:
Sitting down, I can travel
nearly as fast as my mind,
but beneath me is the highway
made of a constant formula. It sticks fast
to the surface of the earth ...
Interestingly, the next poem, "Facial Massage," also references "the road":
Years ago she said you just drive all day,
you never go anyplace. I said the road
is the place. In those days I was twenty-eight
& profound.
These two poems both seem more American than many of Bowering's other poems, tapping into Kerouac's On the Road, though of course, one could argue that there is just as much of a highway culture in Canada's Prairies and the West (perhaps excepting B.C.). Kimmy Beach's In Cars is about growing up in Alberta and driving around aimlessly.
There are certainly many poems about cars and highways and highway culture throughout the rest of the collection, but there are even more about cats (a missing cat makes a cameo in "Motel Consideration"). I think that Bowering's decision to make these "late night poems" led him to return over and over to the cat theme, as cats, particularly black ones, are so closely linked with night and poetry more generally. Close to half the poems have a cat in them.
Essentially all the poems in Section V of Delayed Mercy feature a cat that brings its half-eaten kill to the doorstep as an offering to Bowering. I have to say that these poems don't do as much for me as some of the others, but they are probably the most realistic...
The poems that I liked the most take the cat theme and twist it a bit.
In "After the Dance," riffs on Carroll's Cheshire Cat, then goes in an unexpected direction:
What did you expect, a cat's smile
in the branches? Cats write
the worst poems in the language. ...
In "Soft Gums," Bowering writes: "Words followed / a few paces behind, like cats interested / but uninclined to show it."
Finally, in "Whey" he writes:
Guess
the meaning of life
yourself, deadeye,
look hard
into the flames, those
handsome guys are
cool cats ...
Of course, there is a lot more going on in this collection than just sly references to cats. The meaning of many of these poems is obscure, but they are fun to read and each time through the collection I pick up on different aspects of the poems (this is similar to Kerrisdale Elegies, which I really ought to reread soon). I think it should be clear that I found this a strong collection, definitely worth reading if one is interested in Canadian poetry.
I'll just end with a few bits and pieces from the poems in Delayed Mercy that I found particularly interesting or amusing.
From "A Swing in the Rain":
You see that creature
waiting in the dull light for the 17 bus?
That is the hope of your age, that is bread
going stale tomorrow.
From "Down Long Black Stems":
Cities of rain are judgement
on a failed species. What do you think
that pavement was poured over?
(Could he be thinking of Vancouver?)
Finally, from "A Mask Over the Eyes":
It is dark,
finally, everywhere, the centre of the outside
is dark, black as a mother's imagination.
Delayed Mercy and Other Poems was a collection that really stood out among Bowering's various collections. I think it does have quite a bit of internal consistency. The blurb on the back tries to connect it to Kerrisdale Elegies, but I am not familiar enough that one (though I have read it a while ago) to know if it is a fair comparison.
The largest portion of the book is given over to Delayed Mercy, a large multi-part poem with seven separate sections and different poems in each section. Then there is a short section of 5 poems from late 1984, simply titled Section Two. Then there are some poems retrieved from a notebook called Irritable Reaching. The volume closes out with 7 poems in a section titled The Pope's Pennies.
I wasn't that taken with The Pope's Pennies, and I'll just skip over it here. Section Two was fairly slight, though I liked the opening of "Thanks, Bob":
Reading Kroetsch's poem
about taking the wrong German
train, I missed
my stop. On the Toronto
subway.
Irritable Reaching was by far the most different from the other parts of the book. I think I mentioned before that Bowering seems determined to move to different stylistic techniques, most likely to prevent himself from getting bored, or even as technical exercises that he then deems worthy of publication. Nearly all the poems in I.R. rhyme, but the rhyme schemes start to move away from AABB or ABAB fairly quickly. (Brain that Vanishes has just one extra line that breaks it away from ABAB.) "Detachment from Self" is ABCABCABC, which is fairly unusual. My favorite of the bunch is "Ground and Sky" which goes ABCDEF ABCDEF. I'm not sure if I've ever seen this scheme before. Years ago I wrote a poem that went ABCDEF FEDCBA (though it might actually have another 2 or 4 paired lines -- I'll have to try to track it down to check), which is also very rare.
Still, there is no question that the heart of the collection is Delayed Mercy. Virtually all of the poems are dedicated to different poets, primarily from Canada or the States. It is not clear if these are all poets that Bowering actually knows at least in passing, though it wouldn't be that unlikely if he knew many of them. However, I doubt he knew Samuel Beckett or even Charles Reznikoff, and these are poems that are responding to their public personas.
One or two of the poems to the poets he clear did know do feel a bit "intrusive," as if Bowering is giving you a peek into some shared backstory (that the other poet might not want to share). For instance, "Motel Consideration" is from Margaret Atwood. It opens:
The one more child you never had.
her face appears outside the window,
but when you go outside
only happy birds chitter in their hundreds.
You need a fierce cat.
I'm aware that it is common knowledge that Atwood only had one child, and has talked about this a bit in interviews, but it still feels like oversharing someone else's personal history. Still, poets are notorious for over-sharing (Sharon Olds is one of the more notorious from our era, but the confessional poets of the 50/60s (Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Snodgrass and Sexton) paved that path.
The poem continues with a bit of highway driving, perhaps apropos of a poem about a motel:
Sitting down, I can travel
nearly as fast as my mind,
but beneath me is the highway
made of a constant formula. It sticks fast
to the surface of the earth ...
Interestingly, the next poem, "Facial Massage," also references "the road":
Years ago she said you just drive all day,
you never go anyplace. I said the road
is the place. In those days I was twenty-eight
& profound.
These two poems both seem more American than many of Bowering's other poems, tapping into Kerouac's On the Road, though of course, one could argue that there is just as much of a highway culture in Canada's Prairies and the West (perhaps excepting B.C.). Kimmy Beach's In Cars is about growing up in Alberta and driving around aimlessly.
There are certainly many poems about cars and highways and highway culture throughout the rest of the collection, but there are even more about cats (a missing cat makes a cameo in "Motel Consideration"). I think that Bowering's decision to make these "late night poems" led him to return over and over to the cat theme, as cats, particularly black ones, are so closely linked with night and poetry more generally. Close to half the poems have a cat in them.
Essentially all the poems in Section V of Delayed Mercy feature a cat that brings its half-eaten kill to the doorstep as an offering to Bowering. I have to say that these poems don't do as much for me as some of the others, but they are probably the most realistic...
The poems that I liked the most take the cat theme and twist it a bit.
In "After the Dance," riffs on Carroll's Cheshire Cat, then goes in an unexpected direction:
What did you expect, a cat's smile
in the branches? Cats write
the worst poems in the language. ...
In "Soft Gums," Bowering writes: "Words followed / a few paces behind, like cats interested / but uninclined to show it."
Finally, in "Whey" he writes:
Guess
the meaning of life
yourself, deadeye,
look hard
into the flames, those
handsome guys are
cool cats ...
Of course, there is a lot more going on in this collection than just sly references to cats. The meaning of many of these poems is obscure, but they are fun to read and each time through the collection I pick up on different aspects of the poems (this is similar to Kerrisdale Elegies, which I really ought to reread soon). I think it should be clear that I found this a strong collection, definitely worth reading if one is interested in Canadian poetry.
I'll just end with a few bits and pieces from the poems in Delayed Mercy that I found particularly interesting or amusing.
From "A Swing in the Rain":
You see that creature
waiting in the dull light for the 17 bus?
That is the hope of your age, that is bread
going stale tomorrow.
From "Down Long Black Stems":
Cities of rain are judgement
on a failed species. What do you think
that pavement was poured over?
(Could he be thinking of Vancouver?)
Finally, from "A Mask Over the Eyes":
It is dark,
finally, everywhere, the centre of the outside
is dark, black as a mother's imagination.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
February Round-Up
The last week of Feb. is here. Somewhat surprisingly, it snowed basically all day here in Vancouver, though it never got particularly cold. However, by the evening the snow was sticking rather than melting. We had thought pretty seriously about going to Seattle, but in the end have pushed it off until next weekend. While that probably still won't be great weather-wise, I expect the driving conditions will be a bit better.
There has been considerable progress on the immigration front with our updated visas mailed to us. So it will be legal for me to start at the new job on March 3. (At least a few folks at my current job wanted me to keep working for them for another few weeks.) We also were asked to send off for a UK Police Certificate, which we have done, and then were told to schedule the physicals. Those all took place on Friday, and I think they went ok, though there is a small chance we'll have to bring our daughter back for another go-around. Fingers deeply crossed that that doesn't happen. Sadly, I continue my string of having problems giving blood. It really doesn't take much (in this case a student who started having some problems finding the vein) and I get ready to faint. This happened the last time around as well, as I described in this post. So I pretty much will have to have blood taken lying down from now on, and I think my blood donation days are in the past. It does suck, but I guess it isn't the biggest problem in the world.
I was more annoyed that the weather just hasn't cooperated, so I couldn't test the bike ride to 29th Station using the new path I mapped out. I am going to hope for the best that I can attempt this Tuesday. But I always knew that this was going to be more of a March-April activity anyway (and there won't even be that many opportunities to do the bike riding in March, as I will be on the go from the 2nd or 3rd week).
I am finding it frustrating that there are some interesting movies on, but it is just too hard to schedule around my life. I keep having things come up that force me to scrap my plans to see Her, and now The Great Beauty is playing at the Park for a week or so. These are things that I would have done B.C. (before children) and probably can start doing again after they are in high school and can more or less fend for themselves. I mean I do still go to theatre (and went today as a matter of fact), but I tend to think of that as an event that cannot be time-shifted whereas movies can be and thus always drop in my order of priorities. I may possibly go next week to a free screening of Google and the World Brain (incidentally I am wrapping up a post on Google and art, which makes it particularly serendipitous), but probably I will pass, as I have so much left to do in my last week of work.
My cough has largely (but not entirely) gone away, which was good before having to go into the physical. I was able to go swimming last week, for the first time all month. I read Lee Siegel's Love in a Dead Language, and decided it was ok, but not as clever as it thought it was. It was so indebted to John Barth's work, though I did sort of find the footnotes disagreeing with the main text amusing. This occurred in Barney's Version as well, though not to such an extent.
Quite a few books turned up at the library when I wasn't expecting them. I had pretty much written off Wajdi Mouawad's Heavens/Ciels, but it finally arrived. It's a very, very different play from Scorched. Maybe that is for the best. I haven't had a chance to see Forests, but I can see it sort of aiming for the really intense cliff-hangers of Scorched and not quite reaching them. Heavens has more of 24 vibe, which might be hard to pull off in live theatre (it probably would function better as a movie), but at least it is different. It looks like I missed Tarragon Theatre (in Toronto) doing Forests a couple of years ago, and I doubt they will remount it (though I guess you never know). I certainly wasn't around to see them do Scorched or the remount, though I saw a great version at Silk Road in Chicago. Tarragon is not doing Heavens this year or in its next season (though I may still subscribe -- I saw 4 plays of interest in their 2014-15 season), but if anyone tackles it in Toronto, it likely to be them. I'll write more about Mouawad later, though I would expect to get around to this in March or April.
I managed to borrow the Museum of Anthropology's catalogue of their Safar exhibit. This was an ok but not great exhibit. I was particularly pleased that I won free tickets to the event, and I took my children. Two weeks ago, I went back to see an exhibit on Mexican art, and this was a considerably better from a strictly artistic perspective. Oddly enough, they have privately printed the catalogue, so you can't pick it up on Amazon. As it turns out, the Burnaby Library has ordered a copy, and better still it looks like they will let it circulate, so I put that on hold as well.
This week, there is almost no art on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Just one floor of Emily Carr paintings, though they are some of the best that they own. They dropped the admission price just a bit and are giving out free posters. We dropped by after the physical, and the kids enjoyed it more than I thought. (My daughter hadn't been too enthusiastic about the Carr books on the shelves here.) Next week, there will be a Lawren Harris exhibit, and that is something I am looking forward to.*
I did manage to catch Michel Tremblay's For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. I saw this today at the York Theatre, which is an outpost of the Cultch on Commercial Drive (considerably easier to reach by transit!). They have done a nice job with the renovation and restoration, though the lobby is definitely too small (a typical problem of theatres) and the bathrooms seem much, much too small. The production was part of the Talking Stick Festival. I guess the hook was that it was performed in English translation (fortunately for me) but by First Nations actors. Now there is an indication in the play that Tremblay's mother was from Saskatchewan and part-Cree. I suppose this is in the script and they didn't just add it to make it more topical, though I'll probably try to check a bit later. It was a character sketch with Tremblay putting his mother on stage to show how she was simultaneously a loving mother and a gossipy neighbour and generally a bit of a pain-in-the-rear. I totally understand the impulse, and have occasionally written about my mother here, though she wasn't nearly so dramatic or melodramatic that she would make a good character in a play.
There's still a fair bit to say, but far more work to do tonight, so I think I should wrap up this post now.
* When I did see it, I enjoyed it but was really surprised that the second half of the show documented Harris's move to more of an abstract approach, which is not part of the overall "story" of the Group of Seven and thus is basically not discussed in Canadian art history books.
There has been considerable progress on the immigration front with our updated visas mailed to us. So it will be legal for me to start at the new job on March 3. (At least a few folks at my current job wanted me to keep working for them for another few weeks.) We also were asked to send off for a UK Police Certificate, which we have done, and then were told to schedule the physicals. Those all took place on Friday, and I think they went ok, though there is a small chance we'll have to bring our daughter back for another go-around. Fingers deeply crossed that that doesn't happen. Sadly, I continue my string of having problems giving blood. It really doesn't take much (in this case a student who started having some problems finding the vein) and I get ready to faint. This happened the last time around as well, as I described in this post. So I pretty much will have to have blood taken lying down from now on, and I think my blood donation days are in the past. It does suck, but I guess it isn't the biggest problem in the world.
I was more annoyed that the weather just hasn't cooperated, so I couldn't test the bike ride to 29th Station using the new path I mapped out. I am going to hope for the best that I can attempt this Tuesday. But I always knew that this was going to be more of a March-April activity anyway (and there won't even be that many opportunities to do the bike riding in March, as I will be on the go from the 2nd or 3rd week).
I am finding it frustrating that there are some interesting movies on, but it is just too hard to schedule around my life. I keep having things come up that force me to scrap my plans to see Her, and now The Great Beauty is playing at the Park for a week or so. These are things that I would have done B.C. (before children) and probably can start doing again after they are in high school and can more or less fend for themselves. I mean I do still go to theatre (and went today as a matter of fact), but I tend to think of that as an event that cannot be time-shifted whereas movies can be and thus always drop in my order of priorities. I may possibly go next week to a free screening of Google and the World Brain (incidentally I am wrapping up a post on Google and art, which makes it particularly serendipitous), but probably I will pass, as I have so much left to do in my last week of work.
My cough has largely (but not entirely) gone away, which was good before having to go into the physical. I was able to go swimming last week, for the first time all month. I read Lee Siegel's Love in a Dead Language, and decided it was ok, but not as clever as it thought it was. It was so indebted to John Barth's work, though I did sort of find the footnotes disagreeing with the main text amusing. This occurred in Barney's Version as well, though not to such an extent.
Quite a few books turned up at the library when I wasn't expecting them. I had pretty much written off Wajdi Mouawad's Heavens/Ciels, but it finally arrived. It's a very, very different play from Scorched. Maybe that is for the best. I haven't had a chance to see Forests, but I can see it sort of aiming for the really intense cliff-hangers of Scorched and not quite reaching them. Heavens has more of 24 vibe, which might be hard to pull off in live theatre (it probably would function better as a movie), but at least it is different. It looks like I missed Tarragon Theatre (in Toronto) doing Forests a couple of years ago, and I doubt they will remount it (though I guess you never know). I certainly wasn't around to see them do Scorched or the remount, though I saw a great version at Silk Road in Chicago. Tarragon is not doing Heavens this year or in its next season (though I may still subscribe -- I saw 4 plays of interest in their 2014-15 season), but if anyone tackles it in Toronto, it likely to be them. I'll write more about Mouawad later, though I would expect to get around to this in March or April.
I managed to borrow the Museum of Anthropology's catalogue of their Safar exhibit. This was an ok but not great exhibit. I was particularly pleased that I won free tickets to the event, and I took my children. Two weeks ago, I went back to see an exhibit on Mexican art, and this was a considerably better from a strictly artistic perspective. Oddly enough, they have privately printed the catalogue, so you can't pick it up on Amazon. As it turns out, the Burnaby Library has ordered a copy, and better still it looks like they will let it circulate, so I put that on hold as well.
This week, there is almost no art on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Just one floor of Emily Carr paintings, though they are some of the best that they own. They dropped the admission price just a bit and are giving out free posters. We dropped by after the physical, and the kids enjoyed it more than I thought. (My daughter hadn't been too enthusiastic about the Carr books on the shelves here.) Next week, there will be a Lawren Harris exhibit, and that is something I am looking forward to.*
I did manage to catch Michel Tremblay's For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. I saw this today at the York Theatre, which is an outpost of the Cultch on Commercial Drive (considerably easier to reach by transit!). They have done a nice job with the renovation and restoration, though the lobby is definitely too small (a typical problem of theatres) and the bathrooms seem much, much too small. The production was part of the Talking Stick Festival. I guess the hook was that it was performed in English translation (fortunately for me) but by First Nations actors. Now there is an indication in the play that Tremblay's mother was from Saskatchewan and part-Cree. I suppose this is in the script and they didn't just add it to make it more topical, though I'll probably try to check a bit later. It was a character sketch with Tremblay putting his mother on stage to show how she was simultaneously a loving mother and a gossipy neighbour and generally a bit of a pain-in-the-rear. I totally understand the impulse, and have occasionally written about my mother here, though she wasn't nearly so dramatic or melodramatic that she would make a good character in a play.
There's still a fair bit to say, but far more work to do tonight, so I think I should wrap up this post now.
* When I did see it, I enjoyed it but was really surprised that the second half of the show documented Harris's move to more of an abstract approach, which is not part of the overall "story" of the Group of Seven and thus is basically not discussed in Canadian art history books.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Future Theatre
I'll just use this page to remind myself of theatre productions that I would like to see, even if some are a bit unlikely and involve too much travel. I'm mostly looking ahead to productions in Toronto, as well as potential side trips to Chicago. At the moment, I am not listing anything from the Stratford or Shaw Festivals, though I do intend to start going regularly to those and eventually involving the whole family as the kids get older. Many but not all productions on this list have been culled from the Dramatists Play Service website.
March-April 2014 Vancouver, BC - UBC - Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (I'll probably go see this next month.)
April 2014 Berkeley, CA - Shotgun Players - Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia (3 plays in one day!) (I probably will arrange to see this.)
June 2014 Vancouver, BC - Bard on the Beach (This year I intend to see A Midsummer's Nights Dream and The Tempest. I'm still deciding if my son will join me for one or both performances.)
June-July 2014 Vancouver, BC - Spider Webb Productions - Sharr White The Other Place (I'm not sure about this play. It got good reviews in New York, but seems to require a particularly strong actress. In any event, this production may never get off the ground.)
July 2014 Vancouver, BC - Pacific Theatre - Rajiv Joseph - Gruesome Playground Injuries (This supposedly opens July 2. It might be worth pushing back the move a few days into July in order to catch the previews. Not sure. It depends a lot on mover availability (which might be better if it isn't June 30) and what is finally decided about the place we are renting and the place we will be renting.)
Aug-Sept 2014 Toronto - Soulpepper Theatre - Arthur Miller's The Crucible (Not a play that I want to see too many times, but Soulpepper has a pretty good reputation and might shake it up.)
Oct. 2014 Chicago - DePaul - Nilo Cruz Anna in the Tropics (A pretty interesting play, though one I saw at Victory Gardens. I don't think I would make a special trip to see it, but if I happened to be in Chicago...)
Oct-Nov. 2014 Chicago - St. Sebastian Players - Wendy Wasserstein The Sisters Rosensweig
Nov-Dec. 2014 Chicago - Eclipse Theatre - Lynn Nottage Mud, River, Stone (I like Eclipse's work a lot, but this is the only play from their Nottage season that interests me at all, and I still wouldn't make a special trip to see it, though we might be in Chicago around that time.)
Jan-Feb 2015 Chicago - American Blues Theatre - Steven Dietz Yankee Tavern (I keep missing this play, and it turns out there was an early production in Milwaukee that I found out about right after it closed. If only this opened a bit earlier, we could combine it with a visit over the winter holidays.)
Feb-March 2015 Toronto - Company Theatre - Annie Baker The Aliens
Feb-March 2015 Toronto - East Side Players - Andrew Bovell Speaking in Tongues (This might actually be a play that would interest my wife.)
Feb-March 2015 Brooklyn - Brooklyn Academy of Music - O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (Tickets to this are going to be next to impossible to get (Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy are reprising their roles from the Goodman production). My connections in Brooklyn are thin, so I don't think this one will happen. But never say never. (Tickets go on sale in the fall...) I'm not that interested in going to see it at Broadway prices, assuming that it does transfer there.)
I guess in a year, I can check back in and see how many I actually attended (6-7 is my guess right now, though counting Coast of Utopia as a single event).
Of course, a fair number of plays are announced late and the truly off-Loop productions are often by brand-new authors that don't have representation through DPS, so there should be several plays that get added to the list in the fall after we are established in Toronto and I start scanning the scene there. It will be difficult not to get too distracted by what's going on in Chicago, but I expect I will be staying pretty busy at work, and that will certainly help...
March-April 2014 Vancouver, BC - UBC - Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (I'll probably go see this next month.)
April 2014 Berkeley, CA - Shotgun Players - Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia (3 plays in one day!) (I probably will arrange to see this.)
June 2014 Vancouver, BC - Bard on the Beach (This year I intend to see A Midsummer's Nights Dream and The Tempest. I'm still deciding if my son will join me for one or both performances.)
June-July 2014 Vancouver, BC - Spider Webb Productions - Sharr White The Other Place (I'm not sure about this play. It got good reviews in New York, but seems to require a particularly strong actress. In any event, this production may never get off the ground.)
July 2014 Vancouver, BC - Pacific Theatre - Rajiv Joseph - Gruesome Playground Injuries (This supposedly opens July 2. It might be worth pushing back the move a few days into July in order to catch the previews. Not sure. It depends a lot on mover availability (which might be better if it isn't June 30) and what is finally decided about the place we are renting and the place we will be renting.)
Aug-Sept 2014 Toronto - Soulpepper Theatre - Arthur Miller's The Crucible (Not a play that I want to see too many times, but Soulpepper has a pretty good reputation and might shake it up.)
Oct. 2014 Chicago - DePaul - Nilo Cruz Anna in the Tropics (A pretty interesting play, though one I saw at Victory Gardens. I don't think I would make a special trip to see it, but if I happened to be in Chicago...)
Oct-Nov. 2014 Chicago - St. Sebastian Players - Wendy Wasserstein The Sisters Rosensweig
Nov-Dec. 2014 Chicago - Eclipse Theatre - Lynn Nottage Mud, River, Stone (I like Eclipse's work a lot, but this is the only play from their Nottage season that interests me at all, and I still wouldn't make a special trip to see it, though we might be in Chicago around that time.)
Jan-Feb 2015 Chicago - American Blues Theatre - Steven Dietz Yankee Tavern (I keep missing this play, and it turns out there was an early production in Milwaukee that I found out about right after it closed. If only this opened a bit earlier, we could combine it with a visit over the winter holidays.)
Feb-March 2015 Toronto - Company Theatre - Annie Baker The Aliens
Feb-March 2015 Toronto - East Side Players - Andrew Bovell Speaking in Tongues (This might actually be a play that would interest my wife.)
Feb-March 2015 Brooklyn - Brooklyn Academy of Music - O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (Tickets to this are going to be next to impossible to get (Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy are reprising their roles from the Goodman production). My connections in Brooklyn are thin, so I don't think this one will happen. But never say never. (Tickets go on sale in the fall...) I'm not that interested in going to see it at Broadway prices, assuming that it does transfer there.)
I guess in a year, I can check back in and see how many I actually attended (6-7 is my guess right now, though counting Coast of Utopia as a single event).
Of course, a fair number of plays are announced late and the truly off-Loop productions are often by brand-new authors that don't have representation through DPS, so there should be several plays that get added to the list in the fall after we are established in Toronto and I start scanning the scene there. It will be difficult not to get too distracted by what's going on in Chicago, but I expect I will be staying pretty busy at work, and that will certainly help...
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Drugs in literature
I had originally titled this post "Drugs in art," but decided that I would have to have spent too much time explaining why I didn't really want to discuss music written/performed/enjoyed under the influence of drugs -- and the same thing with certain movies (Apocalypse Now, The Wall). While a number of the great Abstract Expressionist painters were raging alcoholics, it is less clear how many of them were addicted to other types of drugs.
Just restricting the topic of drugs to writers should still be more than enough for this blog post.
The original impetus was reading Narcopolis by small number of characters, then I would have liked it a lot more.
What is somewhat interesting is how few modern writers tackle opium addition. Now opium in its purest form is not generally seen that much in the U.S. or Canada, but opiates more generally are certainly abused. This group contains morphine, codeine and a bit further removed down the chemical chain, oxycodone (or OxyContin). Now Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries talks about being on a wide variety of uppers and downers, and I'm pretty sure that his list included codeine, but I'll come back to Carroll shortly.
More generally, you need to go back to an earlier era when opium was quite legal (and often sold in liquid form as laudanum) to see it popping up in literature. Of the major poets of the Romantic Era, Coleridge was by far the biggest laudanum addict, though I assume Byron and Keats dabbled a little. But no one wrote as extensively about (to say nothing of writing under the influence of) opium as Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater caused quite the scandal in 1821 when it first came out.
Now I have had a copy of this book since roughly 1996. I picked it up in a used bookstore in Detroit (or more likely Ferndale, MI). The reason I remember the general circumstances is that my mother had failed a drug test for a job she had applied for because of her "addiction" to opiates. After racking her brains, she decided this must have been because she had a poppy seed muffin most mornings. Apparently, the drug test was overly sensitive. The prospective employer refused to let her submit a different test including hair sampling from a more reputable lab. So this was definitely a low point in her life, and I thought that picking up the book would have just been rubbing it in, but I bought it anyway, trying to be a bit subtle about the transaction.
So now nearly 20 years later, I finally read it, directly after Narcopolis. The truth is I think I should have read it back then, when I was more under the sway of English literature (and still thought I would become an English professor). The first half is kind of boring where De Quincey writes about his early adulthood and explains that this period of living rough in Wales (because he couldn't get his hands on his inheritance) led to troubles with his digestive system, which in turn induced him to turn to opium for purely medical reasons. Like most addicts, he doth protest too much, though there are some interesting passages here and there. The second half of the book is actually quite dry where he tries to come up with a typology of the pleasures and pains of opium. I didn't find this interesting at all nor his attempts to describe some of his opium-influenced dreams. Apparently, at the time the dreams were considered the most interesting part of book, but they certainly pale in comparison to some of dreams/visions recounted by Jim Carroll, to say nothing of William Burroughs.
Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries is perhaps the most interesting story I've ever read of a guy who could have had a successful career (as a basketball star) but threw it away, not just due to drugs, but because his love of the downtown art scene and Beat poets led him to adopt the pose of an outlaw poet. I can't recall if Carroll talks about being influenced by William Burroughs, but he is clearly in debt to Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. What is a bit different is that these are essentially true memoirs shaped into a fairly conventional morality play. Carroll does not shrink away from describing the lows of being a drug addict, including just the tedium (mixed with a bit of terror) in trying to score drugs before the withdrawal symptoms kick in. (Lou Reed's Waiting for My Man is also pretty good on this score.) One of the more amusing/pathetic scenes in the book is when he (and some other members of his basketball team) takes downers instead of uppers right before a game and they get totally blown out. It just doesn't strike Carroll as remotely odd that drugs were completely pervasive in his school, but then again, he grew up in New York City (and I had a friend who grew up in NYC 15 years later who had a pretty casual attitude towards drugs).** No question I could have gotten into drugs had I wanted to, even in my suburban surroundings, but they weren't so in-your-face as Carroll (and my friend) recounts. Lanford Wilson often did set his plays in this same free-for-all setting, particularly Balm in Gilead and The Hot L Baltimore. It is fair to say that there is a bit of the same feel of a morality play here as well with drug deals often ending in death
While cocaine was the drug of choice for most of the Brat Pack (Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York, and Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero), there is a similar pattern of trying to have it all, and really fucking up because the drugs always end up kicking your ass. (At least that's how I read these late 80s novels.)
In that sense, I think William Burroughs the most radical author who writes extensively about drugs, since he doesn't write stories that (necessarily) end up with the main character brought down by drugs. People's lives may be difficult and tragic, but it isn't just because of drug use or abuse. Again, this is just my reading of his work and life. And for that matter Arthur Conan Doyle definitely seemed to think that Sherlock Holmes' occasional cocaine usage was actually a help to his investigations, but he was writing in a very different time when drugs were hardly as demonized as they are today.
At any rate, I could certainly go on with many other examples, but this covers the main ones on my mind. I do know about a few science-fiction novels where mood altering drugs have a more positive or at least less demonized role, but that is pretty far afield from where I started. Furthermore, I have not touched on drugs that were medically prescribed, like the ones to calm a housewife deeply afraid of death in DeLillo's White Noise or the ones to force Alex to behave and drop his droog-like ways in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.
The biggest gap is surely not saying anything about ganja. I think there are two inter-related reasons. First, there are no novels that I can remember where marijuana use leads to tragic death or even the loss of a job (though I assume there must be at least a few in the later category) and when it pops up it is usually 1) played for laughs or 2) not really a big thing, i.e. a character smokes a joint or two but this doesn't define them as a drug-user. Second, because it is not made into such a big thing by the author, I don't find marijuana usage a particularly memorable part of any novel. I mean there must have been joints smoked in On the Road and certainly S.R.O., but I would have to go back through to find these references, which I don't really care to do. I am fairly sure that ganja is played for laughs in John Nichols' The Nirvana Blues, and it definitely plays a small role in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, where each new boarder at 28 Barbary Lane gets a hand-rolled joint from the landlady Anna Madrigal.
Still if you would like to point out any of my egregious omissions, feel free to do so in the comments.
* Actually, S.R.O. by Robert Deane Pharr is more along these lines with a fairly complex character in the form of a white drug user hanging out in Harlem and sort of spouting off quasi-profound statements about life. Nearly everyone in the run-down S.R.O. is abusing one drug or another, though the narrator is basically an occasional wino and doesn't seem to do any harder drugs.
** One of the most moving (and saddest) poems by Audre Lorde addresses the many children of New York who have fallen prey to drugs:
"To My Daughter The Junkie On A Train"
...
Coming home on the subway from a PTA meeting
...
a long-legged girl with a horse in her brain
slumps down beside me
begging to be ridden asleep
for the price of a midnight train
...
up and down across the aisle
women avert their eyes
as the other mothers who became useless
curse their children who became junk.
(The entire piece can be found in Lorde's Chosen Poems or Collected Poems.)
Just restricting the topic of drugs to writers should still be more than enough for this blog post.
The original impetus was reading Narcopolis by small number of characters, then I would have liked it a lot more.
What is somewhat interesting is how few modern writers tackle opium addition. Now opium in its purest form is not generally seen that much in the U.S. or Canada, but opiates more generally are certainly abused. This group contains morphine, codeine and a bit further removed down the chemical chain, oxycodone (or OxyContin). Now Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries talks about being on a wide variety of uppers and downers, and I'm pretty sure that his list included codeine, but I'll come back to Carroll shortly.
More generally, you need to go back to an earlier era when opium was quite legal (and often sold in liquid form as laudanum) to see it popping up in literature. Of the major poets of the Romantic Era, Coleridge was by far the biggest laudanum addict, though I assume Byron and Keats dabbled a little. But no one wrote as extensively about (to say nothing of writing under the influence of) opium as Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater caused quite the scandal in 1821 when it first came out.
Now I have had a copy of this book since roughly 1996. I picked it up in a used bookstore in Detroit (or more likely Ferndale, MI). The reason I remember the general circumstances is that my mother had failed a drug test for a job she had applied for because of her "addiction" to opiates. After racking her brains, she decided this must have been because she had a poppy seed muffin most mornings. Apparently, the drug test was overly sensitive. The prospective employer refused to let her submit a different test including hair sampling from a more reputable lab. So this was definitely a low point in her life, and I thought that picking up the book would have just been rubbing it in, but I bought it anyway, trying to be a bit subtle about the transaction.
So now nearly 20 years later, I finally read it, directly after Narcopolis. The truth is I think I should have read it back then, when I was more under the sway of English literature (and still thought I would become an English professor). The first half is kind of boring where De Quincey writes about his early adulthood and explains that this period of living rough in Wales (because he couldn't get his hands on his inheritance) led to troubles with his digestive system, which in turn induced him to turn to opium for purely medical reasons. Like most addicts, he doth protest too much, though there are some interesting passages here and there. The second half of the book is actually quite dry where he tries to come up with a typology of the pleasures and pains of opium. I didn't find this interesting at all nor his attempts to describe some of his opium-influenced dreams. Apparently, at the time the dreams were considered the most interesting part of book, but they certainly pale in comparison to some of dreams/visions recounted by Jim Carroll, to say nothing of William Burroughs.
Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries is perhaps the most interesting story I've ever read of a guy who could have had a successful career (as a basketball star) but threw it away, not just due to drugs, but because his love of the downtown art scene and Beat poets led him to adopt the pose of an outlaw poet. I can't recall if Carroll talks about being influenced by William Burroughs, but he is clearly in debt to Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. What is a bit different is that these are essentially true memoirs shaped into a fairly conventional morality play. Carroll does not shrink away from describing the lows of being a drug addict, including just the tedium (mixed with a bit of terror) in trying to score drugs before the withdrawal symptoms kick in. (Lou Reed's Waiting for My Man is also pretty good on this score.) One of the more amusing/pathetic scenes in the book is when he (and some other members of his basketball team) takes downers instead of uppers right before a game and they get totally blown out. It just doesn't strike Carroll as remotely odd that drugs were completely pervasive in his school, but then again, he grew up in New York City (and I had a friend who grew up in NYC 15 years later who had a pretty casual attitude towards drugs).** No question I could have gotten into drugs had I wanted to, even in my suburban surroundings, but they weren't so in-your-face as Carroll (and my friend) recounts. Lanford Wilson often did set his plays in this same free-for-all setting, particularly Balm in Gilead and The Hot L Baltimore. It is fair to say that there is a bit of the same feel of a morality play here as well with drug deals often ending in death
While cocaine was the drug of choice for most of the Brat Pack (Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York, and Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero), there is a similar pattern of trying to have it all, and really fucking up because the drugs always end up kicking your ass. (At least that's how I read these late 80s novels.)
In that sense, I think William Burroughs the most radical author who writes extensively about drugs, since he doesn't write stories that (necessarily) end up with the main character brought down by drugs. People's lives may be difficult and tragic, but it isn't just because of drug use or abuse. Again, this is just my reading of his work and life. And for that matter Arthur Conan Doyle definitely seemed to think that Sherlock Holmes' occasional cocaine usage was actually a help to his investigations, but he was writing in a very different time when drugs were hardly as demonized as they are today.
At any rate, I could certainly go on with many other examples, but this covers the main ones on my mind. I do know about a few science-fiction novels where mood altering drugs have a more positive or at least less demonized role, but that is pretty far afield from where I started. Furthermore, I have not touched on drugs that were medically prescribed, like the ones to calm a housewife deeply afraid of death in DeLillo's White Noise or the ones to force Alex to behave and drop his droog-like ways in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.
The biggest gap is surely not saying anything about ganja. I think there are two inter-related reasons. First, there are no novels that I can remember where marijuana use leads to tragic death or even the loss of a job (though I assume there must be at least a few in the later category) and when it pops up it is usually 1) played for laughs or 2) not really a big thing, i.e. a character smokes a joint or two but this doesn't define them as a drug-user. Second, because it is not made into such a big thing by the author, I don't find marijuana usage a particularly memorable part of any novel. I mean there must have been joints smoked in On the Road and certainly S.R.O., but I would have to go back through to find these references, which I don't really care to do. I am fairly sure that ganja is played for laughs in John Nichols' The Nirvana Blues, and it definitely plays a small role in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, where each new boarder at 28 Barbary Lane gets a hand-rolled joint from the landlady Anna Madrigal.
Still if you would like to point out any of my egregious omissions, feel free to do so in the comments.
* Actually, S.R.O. by Robert Deane Pharr is more along these lines with a fairly complex character in the form of a white drug user hanging out in Harlem and sort of spouting off quasi-profound statements about life. Nearly everyone in the run-down S.R.O. is abusing one drug or another, though the narrator is basically an occasional wino and doesn't seem to do any harder drugs.
** One of the most moving (and saddest) poems by Audre Lorde addresses the many children of New York who have fallen prey to drugs:
"To My Daughter The Junkie On A Train"
...
Coming home on the subway from a PTA meeting
...
a long-legged girl with a horse in her brain
slumps down beside me
begging to be ridden asleep
for the price of a midnight train
...
up and down across the aisle
women avert their eyes
as the other mothers who became useless
curse their children who became junk.
(The entire piece can be found in Lorde's Chosen Poems or Collected Poems.)
Breathing bad
It may be hard to believe, but I have never actually watched Breaking Bad, though I've heard great things about it. Maybe some day, though I have so many other movies and TV series to work my way through. I just always drop watching such things lower than reading or even writing in my priority list. I'm still only 25% of the way through Ikiru, and that's a film I really do want to watch again, particularly before my stint at my current job (which is a government gig) is up.
Nonetheless, I thought I would mark the fact that I have just about gotten over my cough. The fact that I rode my bike a little today (though not as much as I wanted -- darn you Vancouver rain!) helped break up the stuff in my lungs. Long showers and cough medicine also played a role, and a bit more rest than usual.
I've generally always had problems with my lungs, which is most likely due to being a premature baby in the early 1970s when medical technology wasn't nearly as advanced. I couldn't come home right away. I also caught pneumonia when I turned one or two, which was also pretty dicey. I've actually had pneumonia diagnosed 3 times, and probably I didn't find out about it once or twice when I actually did have it.
I had terrible asthma as a child, and recall a few times I simply could not catch my breath. It is terrifying. Once was at Scout camp where they insisted on locking up my medicine. (I think/hope that they no longer keep kids' inhalers away from them, but some folks continue to foolishly follow foolish regulations.)
Oddly enough, I took up jogging in high school and that actually seemed to strengthen my lungs a bit to the point where I rarely have trouble breathing -- until I get sick when it all shuts down. In grad school there would be months I couldn't shake a cough. But this only happened every few years. I have gotten better about going to see a doctor if the cough just can't be beat in a few weeks.
I don't jog anymore, but I should be biking fairly regularly again and I also have been swimming a bit more. This all seems to help. I still tend to take breathing easily for granted once the cough has passed. I think it is just too worrisome to dwell on it, so I repress the trouble I have had in the past (and may have in the future). The truth is it probably will be some lung problems that do me in, but hopefully not for many more years. I'm debating doing a bit more of this (writing what I consider an Autoblography), but for now I'd probably stop short around year 30. Too much after that that I wouldn't want my kids to read...
To bring this back around to art, I'm sure there are a least a few plays/movies about children struggling with asthma, as it has become such an issue in the African American community. However, I cannot think of one off hand, and am not really in the mood to Google.* However, I do remember catching an interesting play by Naomi Wallace called The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East, though in fact she added a fourth episode for Eclipse Theatre's 2011 production in Chicago. The one that is of most interest was about a female Israeli soldier who had cystic fibrosis (I believe) and had just undergone a complete lung transplant. An Arab man turns up and tries to convince her that her lungs are actually those of his son (rather than another Israeli, as she was told). It definitely has some spooky moments as the soldier seems to lose control over her breathing and only can regain her breath when the Arab intervenes. An interesting fable to be sure.
* Well, I did just do a quick check, and it looks like for white kids with asthma, they are generally mocked in movies. I just vaguely remember from Malcolm in the Middle, the Black friend in the wheelchair who also had asthma, though there may also have been another friend with an inhaler.
I had thought that August Wilson tackled asthma in one of his plays, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Spike Lee does touch on growing asthma rates in inner city neighborhoods in Red Hook Summer, though this is a movie that has sort of disappeared under the radar. I certainly haven't seen it, though maybe I will try to look it up this summer.
Nonetheless, I thought I would mark the fact that I have just about gotten over my cough. The fact that I rode my bike a little today (though not as much as I wanted -- darn you Vancouver rain!) helped break up the stuff in my lungs. Long showers and cough medicine also played a role, and a bit more rest than usual.
I've generally always had problems with my lungs, which is most likely due to being a premature baby in the early 1970s when medical technology wasn't nearly as advanced. I couldn't come home right away. I also caught pneumonia when I turned one or two, which was also pretty dicey. I've actually had pneumonia diagnosed 3 times, and probably I didn't find out about it once or twice when I actually did have it.
I had terrible asthma as a child, and recall a few times I simply could not catch my breath. It is terrifying. Once was at Scout camp where they insisted on locking up my medicine. (I think/hope that they no longer keep kids' inhalers away from them, but some folks continue to foolishly follow foolish regulations.)
Oddly enough, I took up jogging in high school and that actually seemed to strengthen my lungs a bit to the point where I rarely have trouble breathing -- until I get sick when it all shuts down. In grad school there would be months I couldn't shake a cough. But this only happened every few years. I have gotten better about going to see a doctor if the cough just can't be beat in a few weeks.
I don't jog anymore, but I should be biking fairly regularly again and I also have been swimming a bit more. This all seems to help. I still tend to take breathing easily for granted once the cough has passed. I think it is just too worrisome to dwell on it, so I repress the trouble I have had in the past (and may have in the future). The truth is it probably will be some lung problems that do me in, but hopefully not for many more years. I'm debating doing a bit more of this (writing what I consider an Autoblography), but for now I'd probably stop short around year 30. Too much after that that I wouldn't want my kids to read...
To bring this back around to art, I'm sure there are a least a few plays/movies about children struggling with asthma, as it has become such an issue in the African American community. However, I cannot think of one off hand, and am not really in the mood to Google.* However, I do remember catching an interesting play by Naomi Wallace called The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East, though in fact she added a fourth episode for Eclipse Theatre's 2011 production in Chicago. The one that is of most interest was about a female Israeli soldier who had cystic fibrosis (I believe) and had just undergone a complete lung transplant. An Arab man turns up and tries to convince her that her lungs are actually those of his son (rather than another Israeli, as she was told). It definitely has some spooky moments as the soldier seems to lose control over her breathing and only can regain her breath when the Arab intervenes. An interesting fable to be sure.
* Well, I did just do a quick check, and it looks like for white kids with asthma, they are generally mocked in movies. I just vaguely remember from Malcolm in the Middle, the Black friend in the wheelchair who also had asthma, though there may also have been another friend with an inhaler.
I had thought that August Wilson tackled asthma in one of his plays, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Spike Lee does touch on growing asthma rates in inner city neighborhoods in Red Hook Summer, though this is a movie that has sort of disappeared under the radar. I certainly haven't seen it, though maybe I will try to look it up this summer.
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